Deadloch: Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney would’ve quit if they had to do another sketch show

Known for their beloved sketch comedy, the Kates wanted to do something totally different for their next project.

Deadloch stars Madeleine Sami, Kate Box and Nina Oyama. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

“It’s nicoise. It’s noir by the sea,” actor Kate Box quipped, immediately evoking both uproarious laughter and admonishment for not coining the term sooner.

Noir-by-the-sea is a comical nutshelling of Deadloch, the new murder-mystery-comedy from Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney, the creative duo also known as The Kates, renowned for their uproarious comedies, The Katering Show and Get Krackin’.

Set in a seaside town in Tasmania, Deadloch opens with a dead body on a beach and the town gearing up for its winter festival. The local constabulary aren’t equipped to handle a homicide, so an outsider from the mainland is called in.

The kooky interloper is about as eccentric as all the weirdo residents, which would be sparkage enough, but when yet another corpse turns up, everything becomes even more heightened.

The interplay between genres – noir, farce and mystery – shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has seen McLennan and McCartney’s previous work, but the scripted format is a departure from their most popular shows.

They were definitely looking for something different.

Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney at the Deadloch premiere in Sydney.

“I think if someone said to us, after Get Krackin’, ‘why don’t you make another sketch show?’ I think we probably would’ve left the industry,” McLennan told news.com.au, before McCartney jumped in and added, “I would’ve them how I feel and I would’ve cried, become a masseuse”.

McCartney explained they had accidentally started doing sketch comedy and their intention had always been geared towards a narrative series. The first pilot they ever did was a 30-minute narrative piece.

“We both had this yearning to do something that had a bit more guts to it, and characters that we could follow the whole way through,” McLennan said, expanding on the point. “It’s very hard to find that nuance with [sketch] characters when it’s a new idea every two-and-a-half minutes.”

The allure of Tasmania’s natural landscape, a mix of beauty and darkness, was also appealing for a creative team that had been trapped inside an artificially lit studio setting.

Much like its Scandi inspiration, the vastness and menacing vibes of Tasmania’s scenery have been the backdrop of Tassie noir, a sub-genre that’s birthed Victoria Madden’s The Kettering Incident and The Gloaming and, to an extent, Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale.

“Tassie was extraordinary because we were all there in this bubble and you lived and breathed the place wholeheartedly,” Box said of her experiences during production.

Deadloch is streaming now. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

McLennan said, “We’d written the scripts before we went down there but, obviously, when you get down there and you look at this place and at locations, the landscape started to inform some of the choices that we made.

“The town is fictional, it’s made up all these places around Hobart. We used to have a map on the production office wall of what this fictional town would look like and in my mind, it’s a real place.”

The fictional town within Deadloch could be a sister city to Twin Peaks where the peculiarities of its citizens give colour to the investigation, and help blend together the drama and comedy. And the environment was part of that.

The balance between light and shade, comedy and drama was a finely calibrated exercise in tone. McCartney said that at times, they recognised there were too many jokes in certain scenes.

“Sometimes, it wasn’t the time for that, and we had to pull it back.”

McLennan, with a laugh, put it in more basic terms, “We tried to do the funny stuff during the day and the serious stuff at night!”

Deadloch has a distinctly Australian sense of humour. Picture: Amazon Prime Video

Both believe the specificity of the Australian humour will land with international audiences.

“My hope is that they’ll be a bit more literate and flexible around how they view things,” McCartney said. “As a viewer, it doesn’t especially matter to me where something comes from so long as it has subtitles. I always need subtitles, even if it’s in English.”

McLennan said even though The Katering Show was in their singular voice, it found a lot of love overseas.

“We just went into this with, ‘We’re going to make it and write it and stay true to these characters and how they would speak’. And I think people will come along.”

Box revealed she has in the past been asked to re-record dialogue on Australian projects which an international producer would ask to be changed. But with Deadloch, Box said, “You just have to ride how Australian it is. It pulls you in immediately, and you tune your ear in.”

And, an international audience is more primed than ever for the Australian voice.

“Bluey has led the way for us!” Box said.

Deadloch is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video